1. Field of the Invention
The instant invention relates to “enterprise search engines” and “knowledge management tools”.
2. Background of the Related Art
According to some sources, corporate information doubles every twelve to eighteen months, making increasingly difficult information retrieval by employees. These sources indicate that the average employee spends one to two hours each day looking for information, finding the information sought roughly 50% of the time. Such inefficiencies impact companies' bottom lines.
While internet search engines such as Google have grown increasingly sophisticated and efficient, they have little application in the corporate context, due in large part to the nature of corporate information. Enterprise documents are often large, complex and multi-topical, and exist in a wide array or document formats. Because of the lack of adequate enterprise indexing, search and retrieval tools, employees often search for information on a document-by-document basis, downloading and reviewing individual documents in an effort to locate the desired information and relevant document page or pages. Inefficiencies in enterprise search and retrieval tools lead to unsatisfactory user experiences, leaving users less inclined to re-use such tools.
To the extent that search tools have been implemented in the corporate context, they have generally been ineffective at properly determining search result relevancy. One attempt to improve search result relevancy determinations is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,434,550 to Warner et al. entitled “Temporal Updates of Relevancy Rating of Retrieved Information in an Information Search System.” Warner discloses an information retrieval system which monitors user actions to determine relevancy of retrieved documents. Specifically, Warner discloses a system that decreases relevancy rankings for documents retrieved in a first search upon a user running second and subsequent searches. Relevancy rankings thus determined are based on certain assumptions regarding user behavior, namely, that by conducting further searches, a user has indicated dissatisfaction with previous search results. This assumption is likely faulty in many, if not most, circumstances. Furthermore, the system of Warner provides no mechanism for assuring with any level of confidence that documents downloaded by users are actually desired by such users based on any informed decision by such users to download such documents.
With these considerations in mind, it is desirable to have an enterprise search engine that enables the user to quickly and seamlessly navigate through a subset of document pages to determine relevance of the information at hand. It is further desirable to have an Enterprise search engine that decomposes documents into individual pages and transforms the decomposed pages into standard page depiction formats such as XPS, PDF, XML/XSL, XHTML, HGML, SVG or bitmap based formats. It is further desirable to generate document relevance and/or desirability information based on user activities and knowledgeable interaction with documents. Finally, it is desirable to identify and/or create social and enterprise relationships based on information learned from user interaction with documents and/or search activities.